The Holiday Cliff Edition.  Congress will be back home during the Thanksgiving week.  So, while there are 36 days from today to the date the last pandemic unemployment checks are sent (December 26), there are only 27 days from when they return.  On New Year’s Eve, the eviction moratorium will expire.  As we approach Thanksgiving, 26 million adults reported that in the past 7 days, their household sometimes or often did not have enough to eat – 12 percent.  Hunger was more frequent in households with children – 16 percent of adults living with children said they did not always have enough to eat in the previous week. 

The we’re-increasingly-alarmed-yet-a-tad-bit-optimistic edition. COVID-19 is burning through America’s heartland like a California wildfire. Over the past week, there has been an average of 134,078 new cases a day, an increase of 72 percent from the average two weeks earlier. The U.S. may soon see new confirmed cases climb above 200,000 a day – a figure that would have been unfathomable when daily cases peaked at over 70,000 new cases a day last July. In multiple states, hospital officials warned that the current spike is straining resources and sidelining the very staffers needed to care for sick people.

The we’re-still-counting-votes-and-COVID-cases edition. Even as a record number of Americans cast ballots in Tuesday’s election, COVID-19 cases in the U.S. reached staggering levels. For the first time, we surpassed 100,000 new cases in a single day. Case levels have reached alarming new records in recent days as outbreaks continue to grow across the country. Weekly infection rates reached record levels in nearly half the country in late October. Oklahoma, Kansas, and North Dakota are among the states struggling to handle the onslaught of cases amid shortages of both nurses – who themselves are infected or in quarantine – and ICU beds.